Hearings begin Thursday on police use of force. We must express our ‘emotional wounds’ in order to heal, pastor says

On Thursday, March 7, I had the honor of standing with black legislators, clergy, and civil rights leaders to announce a series of public hearings regarding the disproportionate use of force by police on African Americans in New Jersey. This is a coordinated and passionate attempt by people who love our community to ensure we take steps to reduce and to prosecute the unnecessary and arbitrary use of force.

Although we are demanding meaningful and effective community oversight, unified standards of reporting, removal of problematic officers, the eradication of a culture that condones abusive behavior, body camera requirements, and better training; we are aware that the real problem is rooted deeper than protocol and procedures can address. Deeply felt pain and trauma exists in African-American communities due to excessive force, and meaningful healing in our communities won’t happen without a process and space to faithfully deal with the history of abuse.

Sadly, the abuse identified in the Force Report could have been anecdotally described by almost any black person without any reporting. This traumatic experienced recollection is a symptom of decades of maltreatment. Historically, African Americans have experienced violence in the name of law, order, and control. This history originates with beating slaves, to the lynching of free blacks during Jim Crow, to the current excessive use of force during the age of mass incarceration.

Not only must we create policies that will stop the abuse, we must deal with the accumulated effect of this trauma on the psyche and soul of our communities. Included in our collective response, is a call for a process that will allow the entire community, everyone affected by this abuse, to partner with the government to create the space for healing.

Our first step toward creating this space comes Thursday, on March 21, at Bethany Baptist in Newark where we will host the first of many hearings across the state. As pastor of Bethany, I believe that it is important that we open our house so that the community might feel comfortable expressing the depths of their pain, and so we can begin the difficult work of healing.

I believe that any place where the community has the space and feels comfortable to express their emotional wounds is holy ground. We consider it a chief aspect of our identity to create sacred space for people to express what is embedded in their hearts.

According to the Force Report in Newark, based on arrests, black people are 203 percent more likely to have force used on them than white people and based on population, black people are 133 percent more likely. Bethany, in Newark then is not only a safe place to have this conversation, but a necessary place to have it, to give voice to those that have experienced abuse in our area.

I have no doubt that emotions will be high and that it will not always be pleasant. In order to heal, people must be given room to speak, vent, cry and scream about what they’ve experience and witnessed. If we really want to be made well, we have to pick up our own mats and take the first steps towards reconciliation and tell the truth to one another. The community must have a place free of critique or limit to testify to their pain.

This is not a new process. Truth and reconciliation has been a major part of the restorative work in communities as varied as South Africa, Greensboro in North Carolina, Maine, and Canada. We need to do it here in New Jersey as well. If we can get to the truth, we can get to the healing we so desperately need. The truth is we need each other. Our search for restorative justice rests on the bedrock understanding of our existential interrelatedness.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said it like this in his letter from the Birmingham jail, “In a real sense all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be....”

The hope for our communities lies in our embrace of this tenet. We must reconcile, the police and the people, the government and the grandmas, the legislators and the church ladies, the Attorney General and the agitators, Black Lives Matter and the boys and girls in blue, we all must find truth, face the truth, be held accountable to the truth and then be reconciled if we have any hope for justice. Join us this Thursday, March 21st at 6 p.m. as we begin this journey.

Rev. Timothy Levi Adkins-Jones is the pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Newark and a member of the NJ Black Multi-Faith Alliance.